Click on the headline (link) for the full text.
Many more articles are available through the Energy Bulletin homepage
Our friends in the north
Christopher Harvie, Guardian
Scotland’s historic relations with Norway are often overlooked, but they should not be ignored.
—-
… Forward to 1964: in the negotiations on dividing the subsea resources of the North Sea, the UK government lost interest in hard bargaining, and allowed the Norwegians to extend their zone to the point of equidistance, rather than ending it at the 600-metre-deep Trench, which was far closer to Norway. Norway thus got the Frigg gasfield and the Ekofisk and Statfjord oilfields. A defeat, had Whitehall but known it, greater than Suez.
Norway had 2.3 million inhabitants in 1900, today it’s 4.5 million. If Scotland had followed her neighbour’s pattern of moderate social democracy, the creation of a welfare state and a flexible manufacturing centre, its population would have been nearly 10 million by today. Just as Baden-Wuerttemberg and Sweden, which had the same population as Scotland in 1900, now have populations well north of 10 million.
More setbacks were ahead. Norway took from the beginning of the oil discoveries a low-depletion oil policy, like the one urged on the Conservatives’ Scottish Office by their economic adviser Dr Gavin McCrone in 1974. This was not done. Neither was there any Oil Fund…
…How do we sort matters out? Well, Scotland still has about a third of her oil left. If she gets together with her Norwegian neighbours in a sort of mini-OPEC, keeps the price of North Sea oil up in the era of Peak Oil (and this may rise in pretty short order to more than $200 a barrel; in 1999 it was only $10 a barrel), and uses the income as collateral to obtain hi-tech equipment and training, then her government can promote the necessary industrial and infrastructural reconstruction.
(1 July 2007)
Gasoline Rationing Finally Comes to Iran
Farideh Farhi, Informed Comment Global Affairs
On the evening of June 26th, the government of Iran suddenly announced that the long-awaited gasoline rationing (and the complementary price increase from about 9 to11 cents per liter) will go into effect in three hours. The sudden announcement created a mad rush for non-rationed and still cheaper gasoline. It also led to sporadic violence, the burning of several gas stations, and reportedly the death of three people. In the morning after, before a gag rule was apparently instituted by the government, all major Iranian newspapers reported on the chaos, with cover story pictures, and the gas station burnings were widely reported outside of Iran.
Proponents of economic sanctions against Iran immediately seized on the events as either a sign of sanctions working or a clue about Iran’s vulnerabilities that can be seized upon in order to pressure Iran further over its nuclear program. Both of these prognoses are off the mark because, as is usually the case with most of the analyses of Iran, the context of decisions or events are either ignored or, more likely, simply not known. So here are a few points that should be taken into account before any judgment is made about the impact of gasoline rationing on the future of the Islamic Republic:
1. No matter what one thinks of the government/regime of Iran, the need to bring under control energy subsidies and the runaway consumption associated with subsidized prices (a malady of most oil producing countries but particularly bad in Iran where population is large and the price is the second lowest in the Middle East after Libya) is something that has been discussed in the post-revolutionary era for years (as early as 1994) and has been the number one “advice” given to the Iranian government by various international agencies such as the International Monetary Fund. In other words, with or without sanctions or threat of sanctions this has been a “burning” issue for years. The need to confront it was in fact an integral part of post-revolutionary Iran’s Fourth Five-Year Plan (2005-2009) approved by the administration of the previous president Mohammad Khatami.
2. Various Iranian governments have been hesitant to deal with the issue because of the fear of social and economic consequences. And this fear is not a post-revolutionary phenomenon.
(1 July 2007)
Good backgrounder on Iran gasoline rationing – much better than the tendentious articles in the media. This article is from a group blog, of which Middle East scholar and commentator Juan Cole is a member. -BA
Oil Boom, Politics Shape Africa’s Future
Edward Harris, Associated Press
Europe’s great powers once scrambled for dominance across vast, underdeveloped African lands rich in raw resources, including the scarlet palm oil used to grease the first cogs of the industrial revolution.
A century later, a new group of nations are competing for a different valuable, viscous material, with Sub-Saharan Africa closing in on the Persian Gulf as the prime overseas supplier of oil to the last remaining superpower.
As China and India increasingly prospect for resources here, terrorism concerns rise and the U.S. military seeks a permanent military presence in Africa, the continent has its greatest international influence in decades. Whether Africa can use its newfound might to end its longtime blight is a separate issue.
(2 July 2007)
